PRO DESIGN, multi-Virtex-7 2000T FPGA-based prototyping system

The folks at PRO DESIGN, veterans in the EMS and EDA industry, have just announced the launch of their new product family of FPGA-based prototyping systems called “proFPGA.”

PRO DESIGN used to be known as the vendor of the successful CHIPit prototyping solutions. This CHIPit business unit was acquired by Synopsys in 2008. PRO DESIGN formed a new development team that has developed a a modular, scalable, flexible, and high-performance multi-FPGA solution that fulfills the highest needs in the area of FPGA-based prototyping.

The proFPGA product series consists of two types of motherboards (duo/quad), different kinds of FPGA modules featuring the latest Virtex 7 technology from Xilinx, a set of interconnection boards/cables, and various daughter boards (e.g. DDR3 memory boards, high speed interface boards e.g. PCIe, USB 3.0, Gigabit Ethernet, etc.) plus an extensive software environment. This addresses customers who need a flexible, high performance, and affordable FPGA-based prototyping solution for early software development and real-time system verification.

“With our new proFPGA product line we react on highest demands in the area of FPGA based Prototyping and we offer with an innovative system concept and latest technologies a solution with highest flexibility, maximum performance and reusability for several applications and projects. In combination with PRO DESIGN’s design and production services and a very attractive pricing structure our solution guarantees a best return on invest“, said Gunnar Scholl, CEO of PRO DESIGN.

The first member of the proFPGA product family is the proFPGA quad V7 system. The system consist of the proFPGA quad motherboard and is equipped with 4 exchangeable proFPGA Xilinx Virtex 7 XCV2000T FPGA modules offering up to 48 million ASIC gates capacity on a single board.

Multiple proFPGA quad systems can be stacked or connected together to provide unlimited scalability and no theoretical maximum in capacity. In addition, the user has nearly 100% access to all available FPGA I/Os (4400). This provides maximum freedom regarding the FPGA interconnection structure, thereby resulting in highest system performance. Furthermore, the system offers a total of 32 extension sites on the top and bottom site for different kind of FPGA modules (Xilinx or Altera), standard proFPGA daughter boards, or user-specific extension boards like DDR3 memory, PCIe Gen3 and all sorts of interconnection boards/cables.

The very elaborate boards of the proFPGA system are optimized and trimmed to ensure best signal integrity and to achieve highest system performance. The high speed boards together with the specific high speed connectors allow a maximum point to point speed of up to 1.2 Gbps over the standard FPGA I/O and up to 12.5 Gbps over the high speed gigabit transceivers of the FPGA.

The first early adopter customers are already using the proFPGA quad system successfully and are impressed by the compactness, flexibility, and pricing of the proFPGA solution. Particularly the concept with the exchangeable FPGA modules and daughter boards convinced the users, because it allows the use for several kinds of applications and development steps like system validation, pre silicon software development, field tests, and even post silicon system verification.

In addition to the well sophisticated hardware, the proFPGA prototyping system provides an extensive set of features and tools, like an advanced clock management, remote system configuration, integrated self- and performance test, automatic board detection, automatic I/O voltage programming, system scan- and safety mechanism, which extraordinarily simplifies the usage of this FPGA based system.

AvailabilityThe proFPGA quad V7 system has been available for early adopter customers since September 2012; general availability will be in Q1 2013.

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This is an interesting one, because I was just writing about another Virtex-7 2000T 3D IC/FPGA-based prototyping system from Synopsys -- the HAPS 70 family ( http://bit.ly/11yhp3G ).
The thing is that a few years' ago, Synopsys purchased the CHIPit business unit and technology from PRO Design.
My brain hurts :-)